CSS can easily be really complicated, you can shovel layer upon layer on it and it still seems to work (a lot of guys just cut and paste in new styles). Most cutting edge CSS I see on sites is just to provide animated transitions and effects - you can reduce a lot of overhead if you don't care about animated headings and the like.
My suggestion is:
- Try to keep it simple - start with the basics - A older but very good book on CSS basics is: Stylin' With CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith
- Use the inspect/debugging tools in your web browser to reveal the smoke and mirrors of website elements you like to figure out whats doing the actual work.
As an example is https://doplaces.com - not perfect but I tried to keep it to a minimum while still being functional and flexible...
Chuck Peddle has claimed credit for the PET's (and later Commodore 8-bit) user friendly screen editor. I have heard it in some interviews with him. The computer History Museum has one interview where he mentions it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enHF9lMseP8
Radio Shack's TRS-80 editor is also not that great either.
But it's interesting that there's no widely recognized fine art medium where physically feeling is the core communicated experience
Then again texture is half the experience of flavor in food
Touch response is pretty much entirely what sounds of pre-electronic musical instruments are, making electronic sound being simulations of touch response in a way
Fashion is also dominated by visual appeal, the uncomfortableness of women's heels for example
> But it's interesting that there's no widely recognized fine art medium where physically feeling is the core communicated experience
Because “fine art” is mostly a distinction drawn based on how distant a thing is from practical, tactile experience fornthe audience (its also why culinary arts aren't, contrary to your list, usually included), anchored in elitism that equates physical engagement as pedestrian and lower class.
If you can't put a “do not touch” sign on it, its viewed as practical art and not fine art.
Recently I was asked to locate an old form document which I found it was written in WriteNow for Macintosh, libreOffice opened it up easily (even without a filename extension) and except for some font substitutions the tables seemed to be all correct. Very impressive.
Some itches that I had scratched in the past - might give you ideas on your own ones to work out:
Text Formatter - paste in copied text with hard returns broken paragraphs, bad characters, etc, clean up text, reform to correct sentences, paragraphs...
Data Parser, take useful but unwieldy raw data and parse it into a readable text, HTML table, PDF pages, etc.
simple event list/tracker input events (name, date/time) and let it be a clock reminder of whats coming up. For next level do global events (event, date, time, country or timezone) and adjust for viewing realtime in local timezone.
One I have thought of but haven't started would be recreate a Commodore C/G telnet BBS in python, where C64s can connect and see it as a Commodore C/G BBS but no limitations of it running on Commodore 8-bit hardware.
Text Adventure Enhancer - that prompts AI creators with descriptions to create enhanced room descriptions and images to enhance an old text adventure...or do a choose your own adventure one where you begin with player adding their picture to use as an image prompt along with the description prompts.
Just try to use something you understand and/or that would be fun for you. so you can concentrate on just figuring out the code instead of having to figure out the subject matter also.
Thanks for the suggestions! Something that really interests me is both data conversions and AI, I’ll try to find something interesting to work on that is in an intersection for both topics. Alternatively, I got an idea to make a tool for comverting a Minecraft world file into a real time render of the world, and make it look good since there is only 1 tool that exists and is pretty outdated and I’ve seen people wanting a wabsite to do it, not a console application.
For Linux get one of those thick Linux bibles and read through it, digest what you can, note what you can't, bookmark parts that pique your interest. Doing this, I got a much better understanding of what Linux is about and capable of, also when I need to know more I have a better idea of what to look for.
My suggestion is:
- Try to keep it simple - start with the basics - A older but very good book on CSS basics is: Stylin' With CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith
- Use the inspect/debugging tools in your web browser to reveal the smoke and mirrors of website elements you like to figure out whats doing the actual work.
As an example is https://doplaces.com - not perfect but I tried to keep it to a minimum while still being functional and flexible...
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